Sustainablility*
When we developed our patented fiber racks for 15 and 50mL tubes in 1994 we didn't have the term Sustainable Development to use so we came up with Earth Friendly®. Now Earth Friendly® is a registered trade mark of Labcon, North America and incorporates all we know about Sustainability*. Our next steps were to continue to innovate products with reduced consumption like the Pagoda® pipet tip reloading system, the first of its kind. We moved on to design a micro centrifuge tube that uses half the plastic of other tubes but still can be boiled without opening, the SuperClear™. We also invested in a solvent-free system to print 15ml and 50ml centrifuge tubes so that there are no VOC's vented to the atmosphere. And in 2005 we received an energy award for reducing our power consumption by 30%.
Labcon and Earth Friendly®
You may notice the Earth Friendly¨ symbol in our literature and on our product packaging and wonder just what it means. We all are skeptical of products that incorporate unsubstantiated environmental claims and today it seems that everyone offers some products with an environmental "angle" or what some call "green" marketing. We believe that our end users want what we want as conscientious consumers; products that provide the performance we need with the additional benefit of reducing our consumption of the worlds limited resources.
Labcon has taken some significant steps to address the concerns we share with our end users about packaging and product waste.
- We have embraced the concepts of Sustainable Development* as a part of our corporate operations.
- We have formed partnerships with end user companies that share our vision of Sustainable Development to better understand what we can do to reduce or eliminate the negative effects of what we take, what we make, and what we waste.
- We have also committed to developing products that look toward Sustainable Development for their inspiration at the same time that they achieve the high performance characteristics that you need
*Sustainability was defined in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission as "Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Sustainable Development means that we must look at the total economic ecology associated with developing and marketing any product or service. Developing products that use less materials is only viable if those products can be produced without hazardous chemicals or processes.